Airtel Africa records $52 million profit in Q1 2018

The Sunil Mittal-led mobile carrier’s Africa revenue climbed 1.5% to $736 million in the three months ended June from $732 million a year earlier. The first quarter in 2017-18 becomes the second consecutive quarter showing profit in Africa.ETTelecom | July 25, 2017, 18:34 IST

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel reported a profit of $52 million Africa for the first quarter of FY 2017-18 from a loss of $78 million a year ago, helped by growth in the data customer base and consumption, while overall revenue growth was helped by currency appreciation on-quarter in CFA, currency used in francophone countries in Africa, and Zambian Kwacha.

The Sunil Mittal-led mobile carrier’s Africa revenue climbed 1.5% to $736 million in the three months ended June from $732 million a year earlier. The first quarter in 2017-18 becomes the second consecutive quarter showing profit in Africa.

Raghunath Mandava, MD and CEO of Africa said that revenue growth for the quarter was 1.5% on-year in the first quarter of the new fiscal, with net revenues up by 3.3% as it shed unprofitable revenue streams.

Data consumption and revenues have grown by 75% and 11.3% on-year, respectively, in the quarter.

“New KYC norms impacted customer additions and consequently revenue growth in the quarter. Our focus to deliver a more profitable business model for Africa has resulted in another quarter of EBITDA margin improvement, with underlying margins expanding by 8.1% Y-o-Y from 19.9% to 28.0%,” Mandava said in a statement issued by Bharti Airtel.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) rose by 42.6% to $206 million from $151 million, a year earlier. The Ebitda margin was at 28%, up from 19.9% in the corresponding quarter last year.

Mobile data revenue increased 11.3% to $138 million from a year earlier. Mobile data now represents 18.7% of total revenue compared with 16.9% in the same period a year ago.

Overall Africa average revenue per user (ARPU), a key performance metric, fell by 5.4% to $3.1 on-year, while sequentially it fell by 0.4%. Total minutes on the network, were up 4.6% to 35.7 billion, from 34.1 billion in the same period the previous year.

Data realisation per MB fell 36.4% to $0.28 from $0.45 in the year-ago period despite Airtel Africa’s data customer base growing 19.4% to 19.4 million from 16.2 million earlier.

Africa data traffic volumes rose by 75% to 48.4 billion MBs from 27.7 billion MBs, while data ARPU was down 7.4% to $2.4 in the same period. Sequentially, data ARPU fell by 1.3%.

The company’s total Airtel Money customer base using the mobile money platform increased by 2.8% to 8.7 million in the quarter ended June 2017. Airtel Money’s transaction value was up by 31.4% to $4.3 billion in Q1 2018, from $3.3 billion the year before.